When you use an IEEE 802.11™ (Wi-Fi®) enabled device, such as your mobile phone, it can use GPS when outdoors because it has a clear line of sight to satellites. But indoors, with a roof overhead and surrounding walls and other obstacles, GPS signals are blocked, and the device needs to connect to Wi-Fi. Outdoors, while a mapping application can take you to a location with great precision, the technology for location accuracy indoors is not nearly as precise—but this will soon change as device manufacturers begin to innovate new use cases leveraging the recently released IEEE 802.11az standard. With most of the world’s mobile data being increasingly carried on Wi-Fi devices, market demand and new technologies are driving innovation of IEEE 802.11. The IEEE 802.11az standard, commonly referred to as next generation positioning (NGP), is the evolutionary roadmap of accurate IEEE 802.11 location appearing first in previous revisions of the IEEE 802.11 standard. Location-based Wi-Fi technology has come a long way. At first, Wi-Fi was primarily a means to connecting computing devices like laptops and smart phones, within an office or home environment. Location accuracy then was only 10–15 meters. So, for example, the use of a wayfinding application on your mobile device in an airport might have taken you to the parking garage, but not to your gate. Improvements came with the release of IEEE Std 802.11-2016, which incorporated fine timing measurement (FTM) to dramatically improve accuracy to about 1–2 meters. Of course, today we expect Wi-Fi to be everywhere—including offices, retail stores, schools, and coffee shops. With increased use of augmented reality, personal tracking, social networking, health care monitoring, inventory control, and other applications, our needs and expectations have continued to evolve, making the need for accurate indoor localization for Wi-Fi-based devices even more important. The new IEEE 802.11az standard is truly groundbreaking, offering more refined and accurate location capabilities, which provide an array of possibilities to device manufacturers. With IEEE 802.11az, location accuracy has moved from 1–2 meters (802.11-2016) to now be accurate to sub 1 meter, into the domain of less than 0.1 meter or about 4 inches. It can help you more accurately find a position in an environment or tell you when you’re closer to it. Beyond location, proximity usages are also seeing a major boost with the introduction of PHY level anti-spoofing mechanism, called Secure LTF. IEEE 802.11az is the first standard to add AES-256-based pseudo random sequences that are single used in the range estimation and protect the range estimation from Man In The Middle (MITM) attacks and other Time Advance attacks. The unique protection mechanism makes use of and expands the IEEE 802.11 security framework, taking advantage of the proofing effort already invested and making IEEE 802.11az a prime technology for uses such as unlocking doors or a PC with a wearable.
